Editor’s note: This week we continue our countdown of Portland’s best new restaurants of 2022, leading to our Restaurant of the Year announcement on Friday. At No. 4: Lilia, chef Juan Gomez’ hyper-seasonal spin on familiar Mexican dishes.
Portland chef Juan Gomez took the call and fell to the floor.
His mother, Lilia Gomez Gamaro, had just been killed near her Phoenix home after a truck ran a red light and slammed into her car. This was late November 2021, and Gomez was still working at the “Mexico-forward” restaurant República, where he would soon take over as chef de cuisine. He called his wife, Sam Cameron, and asked her to pick him up, finished prepping the nopalitos for a cactus dish that night, checked in with his team, took two shots of mezcal at the bar, walked outside, got in the passenger seat and drove to Arizona that night.
Lilia, the South Waterfront restaurant that Gomez opened nearly one year after his mother’s death, is a tribute to her in ways that might not be obvious at first glance. The tagline for the self-described comedor, or dining room, is “Pacific Northwest cuisine through the lens of a Mexican American chef.” That hints at the truth: Though he is not an owner, this is a highly personal restaurant for Gomez, an enthusiastic student of culinary history and technique, obsessed with seasonality and local farms, who credits cooking with turning his life around.
HERE IS OREGON: HereisOregon.com | Instagram | YouTube | Facebook | Twitter | TikTok
“That was one of the hardest days of my life,” Gomez said of the day his mother died. “Having the opportunity to do this restaurant as a tribute to her life and our growing family is just unbelievable. I got into a lot of trouble when I was younger, I didn’t always make the right choices. I wasn’t involved with gangs, but I was around them. I took the rep for some things I didn’t do. And the California Institute for Men is where I learned to cook. And that literally saved my life.”
According to Gomez, his parents weren’t thrilled with his new career, or its starting pay. His father, an alcoholic who died three years before his mom, told him that he “didn’t move from Mexico for you to be a cook.” But Gomez worked his way up the ladder, from fast food restaurants to bars to retirement homes and resorts, eventually landing a job at Salty’s on the Columbia in Portland.
From there, Gomez bounced around a few increasingly high-profile Portland restaurants, including Toki and Little Conejo. But when he first heard about the República opening in 2021, he felt the need to sign on and “get an opportunity to pay homage to my culture and really dive into the history.” But even as the restaurant racked up accolades, including a spot on Bon Appetit’s 10 best new restaurants list during his time as chef de cuisine under opening chef Lauro Romero, the restaurant was never a perfect fit for Gomez.
“At República, it was difficult for me to work into the parameters set by chef Lauro,” Gomez said. “I would always hear, ‘This isn’t Mexico-forward enough. This isn’t Mexican enough. I read a lot of books, went out looking for (traditional Mexican ingredients), and even though I was semi-successful in that, there were a few times I was told, ‘No, you can’t do a quesadilla with broccoli.’”
Enfrijoladas, a cousin to enchiladas, topped with Santa Barbara uni and stuffed with a chanterelle mushroom duxelles, at Lilia, a new South Waterfront restaurant from República Hospitality Group and chef Juan Gomez.Michael Russell | The Oregonian
If you visit Lilia right now, you might find a quesadilla made from dark blue corn and gooey quesillo from Salem’s Don Froylan Creamery, the whole thing gently crisped and topped with in-season Brussels sprouts from Winters Farm near Troutdale. This isn’t some ingredient-driven abstraction at Pujol or Quintonil, destination Mexico City restaurants that Gomez notes he hasn’t had a chance to visit — he hasn’t been able to return at all since his parents brought him from Mexico to San Diego as a 2-year-old. Instead, the quesadilla is a hyper-seasonal ode to a familiar dish, and a worthy rival to the famed version at República.
Read more: Pearl District’s República leads with ambitious tasting menu, Portland’s best tortillas
República Hospitality’s Angel Medina and culinary director Olivia Bartruff have been busy this year, opening cafes, restaurants and, earlier this week, a bakery. Just keeping up with the announcements can be head spinning. One dimly lit Northwest Park Avenue taqueria we visited for our new restaurant guide, Taqueria Los Ponchos, had rebranded as a cocktail bar, Bar Comala, just two weeks after we visited. So far, the gem among the newcomers appears to be Lilia, which earned a spot on Esquire’s restaurant issue — the same one that named Portland’s Kann the best new restaurant in America — 30 days after it opened.
Like República, Lilia offers a tasting menu ($80 when we visited), and if you’ve made the time to drive down here and hunt for parking, you should probably just go for it. These six-course meals typically start with a nicely shucked Washington State oyster under a little scoop of granita, perhaps a spicy, Midori-green sorbet of serrano and pear. There could be crunchy tacos dorados hiding an Oregon-grown Meyer lemon crema, warm enchiladas swimming with Santa Barbara sea urchin (one of just a handful of non-local ingredients), or duck tinga huaraches dotted with pink radish slices and “nasturtiums from my wife’s garden.”
If you only order one thing, it should probably be the pork collar carnitas that Gomez attempts to age for seven days in its own lard, confit-style, then crisps to order and serves alongside some griddled pan arabe (think of a Mexican version of Indonesian roti and you’re not far off). It’s delicious, if not for the faint of heart. Ideally, Gomez would like to rest his carnitas even longer — he quotes the Southern chef Sean Brock as saying that if it hasn’t been confined in fat for several weeks, it’s not confit — but Lilia opened on a tight budget in a former Pizzicato location and had to make do without a walk-in fridge.
Desserts on our visit didn’t hit the bar set by the savory courses — the sturdy arroz con leche panna cotta was an interesting experiment that didn’t quite pan out. But we were offered the chance to revisit a dish, and we chose to have another oyster with its refreshingly spicy granita, a fine way to finish off an impressive meal.
Lilia would have been proud.
What to order: The tasting menu, though if you only order one thing, it should probably be the carnitas.
Details: Lilia is open for dinner Wednesday to Sunday at 3159 S. Moody Ave.
Read more: Portland’s best new restaurants of 2022
— Michael Russell; mrussell@oregonian.com
Our journalism needs your support. Please become a subscriber today at OregonLive.com/subscribe